I’m signing off from my fantastic adventure that was the SOS/CLM/CBG internship with much gratitude and appreciation to the people and systems that put time, energy and effort into making this program a possibility.

My time with the CLM was slightly different than the experience that most people had. Instead of working in a BLM Field Office, reporting directly to a natural resource specialist within the Bureau of Land Management, I was dispatched to Patagonia, Arizona to work for Borderlands Restoration, L3C. I still had duties that required me to collect seeds using the Seeds of Success protocol, but anything over the 10,000 seed accession that the BLM held on to came back to Patagonia to be used for restoration mother plant populations. Once these mother plant populations are established, we will be able to dramatically ramp up the source of readily available native seeds for use on public and private lands alike.

My favorite aspect of the CLM/SOS/CBG internship is that it connected me with people actively involved in restoration. I was afforded the opportunity to identify native plants in the field while strengthening relationships with conservationists from different federal agencies and private industries alike. I know that the connections I made will continue to develop, even though my funding source will change.

The funding that SOS provided allowed me to develop a seed collection protocol for Borderlands Restoration, passing on knowledge to another organization. I will in turn train future seed collectors with other funding sources to over time increase the available seed resources for future restoration activities. The SOS support also allowed me to set up a seed lab for Borderlands Restoration to clean, assess, and store wild seeds.

Now that I’m equipped as an experienced wild seed steward, I’m excited and honored to continue carrying the torch of seed love. I’m excited to continue developing as a seed scout, harvester, cleaner, hoarder and steward. Thanks for all of the knowledge, resources and support Bureau of Land Management, Seeds of Success, Conservation and Land Management and Chicago Botanical Garden! May this internship continue to bear many yields of delicious fruit

My fellow interns and I have stayed very busy the past few weeks monitoring and measuring plants all across the Mojave Desert. This past week we traveled to all three of our common gardens to monitor and measure our transplants for a second time. We were happy to see that survivorship in the gardens is still quite good and many plants have new growth.

In addition to measuring and monitoring the common gardens, I also traveled to the Eureka Valley in Death Valley National Park to continue with measurements of two endemic and endangered species: Eureka Valley dune grass (Swallenia alexandrae) and Eureka Valley Evening Primrose (Oenothera californica ssp. eurekensis). Although the strong winds, heat, and aridity of the Eureka Valley create a rather hostile environment, these plants don’t seem to mind! Many of them have dramatically increased in size since my last trip to the dunes and several have an abundance of flowers and seed pods.

As I struggled to stay hydrated and avoid sunburn I couldn’t help but marvel at the adaptations that enable many organisms, including the plants I measured, to successfully live in the dunes. Although I finished each day of fieldwork feeling exhausted and a little sunburnt, my experiences in the dunes were extremely rewarding. I enjoyed working with plants that are found nowhere else in the world. Additionally, the scenery of Eureka Valley is absolutely breathtaking. Each night when I would camp under the stars I had a stunning view of the Milky Way stretched across the entire night sky. This is a sight I had never seen before and it is one that I know I will never forget.

Until next time!

Renee Albrecht

Las Vegas Field Office, USGS

The sun sets on a day of fieldwork in the Eureka Dunes!

My last month here has been an exciting one: the desert is in bloom. Every week, a new plant comes into bloom. One week the palo verdes turn from pale green to bright yellow, the next the massive silver-grey ironwoods turn pink, and the dense arrowweed stands are all tipped with little purple flowers. But easily my favorite of all these are one that just came into bloom this week, the Smoke Trees. Normally they’re a uniform grey green color, billowing out in a way that really does look like smoke. But this first week of may, they’re flowering, and the silvery plant is suddenly spotted with rich purple-blue. Looking closely, one can see that each flower is ringed with orange spots on the sepals, and with a deep orange stamen poking out the end. Amazing, and presently my favorite plant out here.

Of course, shortly after flowers come seeds, and shortly after seeds come CBG Interns collecting for Seeds of Success. So I’ve had my work cut out for me there: seven 10,000-seed collections done and mailed off to be cleaned, with plenty more to come. It looks like my fellow interns are also enjoying the desert flowers, so I hope they are all as enamored by the smoke tree flowers as I am.

Joe Brehm

Eriogonum ovalifolium var. vineum

Pholisma arenarium

Mojave paintbrush

We’ve been doing surveys for carbonate endemics and other sensitive species at two mining claims, out towards the desert side of the forest.  There’s a lot blooming right now, including the adorable borage above (Pholisma arenarium) and the federally endangered Cushenbury buckwheat (Eriogonum ovalifolium var. vineum).  I headed down to the chapparal for a backpacking trip over the weekend, for a taste of another part of the San Bernardino Mountains flora.   

We finished surveys on the north side of the forest, as part of a project to close some unauthorized off-road vehicle routes, while designating others.  Mojave paintbrush (Castilleja plagiotoma, pictured), a hemi-parasite on buckwheat and sagebrush, was one of our target species.  We’ll be conducting surveys in the southeast part of the project area in May; since this area is at a higher elevation, the phenology is farther behind, and we’ll be focusing on a different suite of species of species. 

In mid-April, we attended a Forest Service sponsored Poaceae workshop at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden.  It was a great introduction to CA grass genera, grass morphology, and more difficult and subtle key steps and characters.

Mountaintop RD, US Forest Service

Big Bear Lake, CA

The maples were almost in bloom when I left the city of Buffalo to begin work as a botany intern in the Vale district of Oregon. Soon their fruits will mix with the urban sounds in the air and perhaps land gently on the waters of Lake Erie. I’ve lived in Ontario, Oregon for a month, yet, the torrents of Niagara River escaping the glassy waters of Lake Erie persistently occupy my consciousness. Personal relationships formed and disappeared within that industrial environment and memories of those now guide me through a new land void of my personal narrative.

My main interest concerns the ecological relationships within a social and natural system that constantly places us within a complex narrative full of diverse elements. However, despite my best efforts, my descriptive abilities fail as I try to explain the layers of relationships occurring within the public lands and sagebrush steppe. A long history of use sits heavily on these lands and it appears on the landscape as some indecipherable script.  As I try to write something of this hidden language for the entry, I come in contact with a photograph of two men near Steens Mountain. Both men wearing denim jeans and layers of cotton flannel stare into the camera with a dejected aspect to their faces. Behind them a vast steppe stretches to the foot of the mountain and a startling gray looms in the sky.  A shovel sticks out from the ground and one of the men holds a cheat grass bouquet. I mention this photograph because it captures a moment in the ecological transformation of the sagebrush steppe. A change sparked by the grazing of cattle and continues to this day. Perhaps after staying out here and listening to more stories about the land I will be better equipped to explain these relationships, but this is all I have for now.  

After working as a botanist and environmental educator in Oregon for more than 7 years, my present stint at the BLM Ridgecrest Field Office feels a bit like a sabbatical. What a learning experience and adventure it is proving to be; less than 2 months into my internship here, I have already experienced a tremendous variety of work projects and outings, here in the Western Mojave.

Wildflower display in Nine Mile Canyon, Sacatar Trail Wilderness

Taking advantage of recent spring rains in the Western Mojave and Eastern Sierra Nevada, and the amazing blooms that have followed, the Seeds of Success program is once again a major focus for me. The combination of sufficient precipitation and our team’s dedication has resulted in more forb-species seed collections than have occurred here during the past several years.

Caulanthus inflatus population, Grass Valley Wilderness

In addition to the native seed collections I have taken the opportunity to involve myself in several other aspects of botanical work, at the Ridgecrest Field Office, and elsewhere in the California Desert District. Highlights include:

• As part of an interdisciplinary team, I helped conduct rangeland health assessments in the Bright Star Wilderness, where we performed quantitative toe-point vegetation transects, as well as qualitative proper functioning condition (PFC) assessments of a grazing allotment.

Interdisciplinary team, hiking into the Bright Star Wilderness

• Another exciting aspect of the internship has been several days of rare plant monitoring, tracking the progress of populations of Astragalus magdalenae var. peirsonii (Peirson’s milk-vetch), Cymopterus deserticola (desert cymopterus), and Mimulus shevockii (Kelso Creek monkeyflower). Other BLM special status plants that I have had the pleasure to encounter in the field include Erythranthe rhodopetra (Red Rock Canyon monkeyflower), Phacelia nashiana (Charlotte’s phacelia),  Eschscholzia minutiflora subsp. twisselmannii (Red Rock poppy), and Pholisma sonorae (sand food).

Rare plant monitoring in the Algodones Dunes

Phacelia nashiana, a BLM special status plant

• While perhaps not quite as much fun as finding rare plants, another important project has been working with invasive plant inventories. This has included becoming familiar with the NISIMS (National Invasive Species Information Management System), using mobile GIS tools to record, map, and report weed infestations and treatments.

Workers prepare to remove an invasive salt-cedar from a riparian area in the El Paso Mountains

• Collecting for the plant display at the Ridgecrest Desert Wildflower Festival, teaching botany lessons to fourth graders for the Sand Canyon Environmental Education Program, and helping to document a new species of Claytonia with botanists from Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, are a few more of the diverse botany projects, in which I have participated so far.

Owens Peak Wilderness

Gopher snake near Grass Valley Wilderness

And much remains to come! On the horizon is a NEPA training in Las Vegas, a vegetation monitoring class in Billings, plant mapping projects, writing assignments, and yes, more native seed collections. I will be sure to keep you posted as things begin to heat-up here in the Mojave.

Marcus Lorusso

BLM Ridgecrest Field Office

Carson City is a beautiful place. The ecosystems that surround us are pretty unusual and still new for me since this is my first season here, out in the southwest. Many local people mistakenly call this area a “desert” but I probably should disagree with this statement while observing all the life flourishing and developing right at this moment. This so called desert is getting greener every day. The plants aren’t the only evidence of this gradual but still unconcealed and dramatic change. For instance, last week on the street where I walk almost every day, I saw some bats which I haven’t seen before. They were vigorously hunting around a forest line apparently being pretty hungry after a long dream. Of course they could have just come here from somewhere else, but for me it was definitely a sign of some spring change that affects all the living organisms inside the Morgan Mill St’s ecosystem. Quite the same evidences we all, as botanists, can notice monitoring all the ephemeral plants being in flower stage for only a few weeks. And actually, I must say I’m grateful to have a unique opportunity to see such plants like Erythranthe sp., Ivesia webberi, etc. here in bloom, and moreover to contribute to their study and conservation! That is indeed an amazing feeling. There are actually many more “firsts” I’m doing and encountering here for the first time, even after being here for almost three months, and I think I’ll try to keep this “never-boring” tendency for the future as well.

Until next time,

Andrii

Carson City, BLM

The two native agaves of the Patagonia area are critical nectar resources to the two species of migrating nectar-feeding bat that flies through the area biannually. The agaves and bats coevolved, timing major life-events with each other. As bats fly across the grasslands and desert of Southeastern Arizona in spring and fall, these two species of agaves are timed to shoot up their flowering stalks to lure the bats into moving pollen from one flowering stalk to another with the reward of nutritious and plentiful nectar. Therefore, maintaining healthy populations of these two species of native agaves is critical to maintaining healthy populations of these nectar feeding bats.

Last week, a whole crew of us descended upon a large population (400+ plants) of the Huachuca Agave, Agave parryi var. huachucensis. Many of these individuals were clonal pups, crowding each other out as they continued to grow.

Harvested pups were brought to the Borderlands Restoration greenhouse located on the Native Seeds/SEARCH Conservation Farm to be grown out by Francesca. Eventually these babies will be used to create new patches of Huachuca Agave throughout the landscape.

These special agaves flower themselves to death. As they age, sugars and nutrients are collected in the “heart” of this creatures rosette. With a final hurrah, the agave shoots up a stalk a dozen feet in the air that flourishes with hundreds of flowers dripping with delicious nectar. Many other pollinators are supported by the sugar-packed nectar the agave produces to entice support in its reproduction. Like many plants, the agave hedges its bets. It also produces clones, pups that oftentimes outlive the parent.